Book Review: 1st Case by James Patterson and Chris Tebbetts

Published in 2020. Thriller. Angela Hoot is a 19-year-old at MIT but is asked to leave after she hacks another student’s computer. Fortunately, her friend and mentor, Eve, secures her a job as an intern for the FBI. On her first case, Angela is called in to use her computer skills to investigate the murder of an entire family. She begins by opening up the laptop of the teen-ager and finds an app that looks suspicious and may explain the murders. She takes a dive into the app’s coding to find out who it came from and where. As she does, she finds another potential victim and alerts the FBI. Nothing happens to her, but across town, another young woman is abducted. The only way to solve this mystery is to understand the code, so Angela plunges in deep, only to come to the attention of the coders, who come after her.

I don’t know much about coding and admittedly, have a difficult time using computers, but I got the gist of it. This is the new way of committing crimes from petty theft to murder. I’ve been a victim of a scam myself, so I know how it feels, but fortunately, it didn’t involve any physical harm, only mental and emotional, which is just as bad. It’s too bad these hackers don’t have anything more productive to do with their lives.

There was only one error I found, and it had nothing to do with the coding or computers since I wouldn’t really know in those cases. In one scene, the FBI were carrying AK-47s. These are Russian-made weapons, and not a normal part of the FBI arsenal.